Premiership table on 17/09/05

The current state of play.
Third. Until tomorrow when they'll likely be fourth.
If Worcester can beat Wasps away next week they will be in third at least, and then they might begin to be perceived as possible challengers for the premiership title.

Worcester 25 Saracens 24

An incredibly exciting game won by Worcester scoring a try (and conversion) in the 80th minute. It looked as if Worcester would have to accept a defeat after Saracens ran in a try with a few minutes left on the clock. Frustratingly Worcester had a try cruely disallowed. The odds of winning didn't look good at that point. If the try was indeed wrongly disallowed then the injustice was reversed by the 80th minute try scored by Windo with Drahm's conversion. The added time seemed to last forever as the warriors were desperate to reach the finishing line with their slender one point advantage. The ideal situation would have been for them to get another try and take away the bonus point as well as the four for winning, but lets not be too greedy, eh.

In the Leicester Bath game, Bath appear to be putting up a serious fight as they've just scored a converted try with about 25 minutes left. (16-23)

The Premiership table will make interesting viewing later.

Guinness Premiership Week 3

After a great start by the Worcester Warriors in the first two weeks in which they drew against Gloucester (15-15) and won away at London Irish last week, they will be hoping to make it three unbeaten games this afternoon when they meet Saracens at [Fortress] Sixways. After last week Worcester were sitting in fifth place in the table; with a little luck they might move up another place or two by this evening.

Drahm and Le Roux both make their first starts for Worcester this afternoon. Drahm was an automatic selection due to the fact Brown was injured early in the game last week. The selection of Le Roux this week certainly appears to have killed off the rumours of him leaving the club. I think both Drahm and Le Roux are going to be key players for Worcester this season. What i saw of Le Roux in the Middlesex sevens tournament three weeks ago really impressed me. If the rest of the team can tune into the frenchman's mind we could see some very creative and effective rugby by Worcester this year.

Last night London Irish suffered their second defeat of the season when they were soundly beaten 29-3 by Sale Sharks. (ouch!)

The season is in its early stages but the two teams predicted to finish at the bottom of the table are doing rather well, and in Bristol's case, extremely well. You can't get better than sitting at number one when everybody was writing you off (including me) before the season began.

In the prediction league on the Warriors supporters site i predicted todays result to be a 19-15 win for Worcester. I'm hoping this season the accuracy of my predictions improves. Last week i predicted 15-23 to Worcester (I would have changed it late on to 15-19...but i forgot). Not a bad guess either way as the score ended as 15-20.

Score predictions
Today's games
Worcester 19 Saracens 15
Northampton 22 Newcastle 15
Leicester 36 Bath 12 (I don't see this being a very pretty sight for the already suffering Bath supporters)

Sunday's games
Bristol 17 Gloucester 21 (I have a feeling a third successive win for Bristol will be just beyond their reach)
Leeds 14 Wasps 26 (I don't think Leeds' poor start to the campaign will improve this weekend)
In my opinion Leeds and Bath will almost certainly still be keeping each other company at the bottom on Sunday evening.

We shall see later.

What would we do without Google?

Nice to see that Google now has a Blog search. It's just what I've been waiting for. I'm surprised its taken this long to appear. My blog exists in the blog search but doesn't appear to reside in the normal Google search. Hmmm.

Wayne Rooney sees red

Good old Wayne was making headlines again this week for the wrong reasons.
This time it was during the mid-week Man UTD game against Villareal, when after being given a yellow card he "ironically applauded" the referee and received another coloured card for his efforts - a red one.

He's never going to learn how to control his behaviour. Some might say "he's only 19.. blah blah blah". They have a misguided opinion that he will mature and be able able to control himself more than he currently manages to do. Those people will be saying the same in ten years from now. Rooney is a blot on the English football landscape. It's unfortunate that a brilliant player like Rooney should also be a brilliant idiot. A jewel and a blot all in
one.
It was never going to work out. When i first heard of this exciting young footballer called Wayne Rooney emerging at Everton I had a feeling that it was all going to go very wrong before very long. His name was Wayne for a start. It was a bad omen, it really was. How can we (football fans and the country in general) have been dealt such a cruel hand with a possible future legendary sportsman being called "Wayne".

I don't want England to win the World cup next year, especially if Rooney is in the team. How can i say that! (It's very easily actually). I lost much interest in the game at the end of Engand's last world cup campaign when in the second half in the semi-final against Brazil the team did absolutely nothing and showed less passion and desire to win than they do in one of the meaningless friendlies they play. It was at that time i decided that England would not win a big competition whilst Eriksson is coach. Others have said the same since, they just needed another three years to realise the fact. I don't want Engand to win and for Rooney (and maybe one or two others) to become even bigger names in the history of English football than they already are. World cup wins don't come around very often. I mean, many people still go on about the last win which was forty years ago next year. It's really quite embarasssing that we have to fall back on memories of an event that happened so long ago. Infact the majority of English fans don't even have a memory of that event. I just couldn't bear it if we won and Rooney was to score the goal that secured the victory knowing that it'll end up being repeated for the next forty years.

What a shame that one of the top English footballers is also a foul-mouthed hotheaded moron called Wayne who visits prostitutes. What a role model. It could simply be that he is representative of a large portion of today's society. Historians will look back to this time and point to Rooney as being the archetypal "chav" of our time.

There is more to sport than simply winning.

Just a quick note

I headed to the BBC news page earlier and see the top story has the headline "Bush vows biggest relief effort".
I assumed it was referring to this story, in which Bush in a written note to Condoleezza Rice asks her to advise him on another much needed relief effort.
Apparently, according to this post at Biased BBC there may be reason to believe that the latter story with accompanying picture is fake.
When I first saw the photo my assumption was that it was just a stock photo they'd plucked out to illustrate the story. I may be proved wrong but something about it just doesn't feel genuine.


"The photograph, and Mr Bush's apparent request for permission to pee, has been the subject of discussion on a number of satirical websites." (I wonder if the BBC realises its own site often appears to reside in the "satirical websites" category)

As is often noted at the Biased BBC site the BBC has a habit of "stealth editing" articles after they've been published. Some of the editing is so drastic that entire articles can simply disappear without trace. If this picture ultimately proves to have been fake I have no doubt the BBC will make that article conveniently disappear too.

The BBC just can't resist taking the piss out of Bush at every opportunity.